Competence and its assessment in a professional training situation

Abstract

Despite its roots in the writings of the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), and secondarily in the work of Alfred Schutz (1899-1959), a phenomenologically-based sociology has only come to prominence in the English-speaking world within the last decade and a half. The publication within a few years of each other of the three volumes of Alfred Schutz's "Collected Papers" (1962a, 1964a, 1966), Aaron Cicourel' s "Method and Measurement in Sociology" ( 1964), Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's "The Social Construction of Reality" (1966], Harold Garfinkel's "Studies in Ethnomethodology" (1967), and .Jack Douglas's "Social Meaning and Suicide" (1967], brought to the attention of Englishspeaking sociologists - many of them for the_ first time - the existence, or the possibility of the existence, of yet another alternative paradigm to positivism This thesis represents an attempt to work within this phenomonological tradition by focusing analytic attention on "competence" as a routinized feature of everyday life. Show more